A brick fortress that once guarded Boston families' pianos, bronzes, and carriages behind two-foot-thick walls has reopened on Massachusetts Avenue as MIT's new School of Architecture and Planning. The century-old Metropolitan Storage Warehouse, long known simply as the Met Warehouse, sat windowless and dormant for years before university crews cleared out its final storage rooms in 2016 to begin a transformation into one of MIT's most ambitious academic buildings.
According to NBC Boston, MIT has now opened the Cambridge landmark as a new home for design education, capping decades of reimagining for a building that once held over 1,600 individual storage rooms. The design work fell to architecture firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro, working alongside executive architect Leers Weinzapfel Associates, which led the transformation of the landmark structure, according to the firm's own project materials.
From Sealed Vault to Sunlit Studios
The original building, designed in phases between 1894 and 1923 by architects Frederic Pope and Peabody & Stearns, stretched 500 feet along what was then newly developed land on the Charles River Embankment, according to CultureNow. It was advertised at the time as indestructible and fireproof, a secure place for wealthy Bostonians to store valuables. MIT acquired the property in 1962 and used it as university storage for more than 50 years, per research from Altieri, before initiating redevelopment planning in the late 2010s.
That storage-vault design, with tight column grids, low ceilings, and almost no windows, created a serious problem for architects trying to turn the building into functional classroom and studio space. Diller Scofidio + Renfro's solution, dubbed a “Plus Minus” strategy and inspired by the work of architectural artist Gordon Matta-Clark, involved carving multistory glass-walled voids into the brick shell and suspending double-height studio stacks from the roof to pull daylight deep into the structure, the firm explains on its project page.
A $100 Million Anchor for Design Education
The renovation carries an academic mission as large as its architectural one. In March 2022, the Morningside Foundation donated $100 million to establish the MIT Morningside Academy for Design, an interdisciplinary research and education hub now housed inside the building, according to Forbes. The gift, from the Chan family's foundation, created a campus-wide anchor for design, engineering, and urban planning work that had previously been spread across multiple buildings.
The finished project totals roughly 217,000 gross square feet, unifying the School of Architecture and Planning, the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, the Center for Real Estate, and Project Manus's makerspace under a single roof, per the same Altieri account. Construction officially began in June 2022, following planning that started back in 2018 under School of Architecture and Planning Dean Hashim Sarkis, with occupants finally moving in this month.
Bridging MIT's Campus and Its History
Situated at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Vassar Street and known internally as Building W41, the renovated warehouse functions as a symbolic west campus extension of MIT's famous Infinite Corridor, connecting east and west campus pedestrian flows through internal walkways. That positioning gives the school a physical bridge role on campus that its decades as a sealed storage vault never allowed.
Preservation rules shaped nearly every structural decision along the way. Listed on the Massachusetts State Register of Historic Places, the building's two-foot-thick brick walls, square tower, and crenellated cornices were preserved under guidelines coordinated with the Cambridge Historical Commission, mandating that the historic exterior masonry stay intact even as architects reworked the interior. The project team also designed the conversion to meet a minimum target of LEED Gold environmental certification, with MIT Capital Projects noting that reusing the massive existing brick structure avoided the embodied carbon costs of tearing the building down and starting over.
